The Big Pitcher: 20 Years of Abstracted Figure in Chicago Art, catalog, 1983

VIVARIUM

Exhibition Dates: March 2 - May 5, 2018

Artist's Reception: Friday, March 2, 2018 5:00-8:00 p.m.

In its antiquated definition, the vivarium existed for the study of animals and plants. Vivarium, Mary Lou Zelazny’s fifth solo exhibition at Carl Hammer Gallery, presents her own studies of the plant world. These are pictorial taxonomies of re-imagined flora manifest ideas that have been germinating for several decades; ideas extracted out of an extensive series of now dispersed flower paintings from the 1990’s and nurtured through Zelazny’s continuous practice of plein-air landscape painting.

The works on display here are collaged from a monoprint process emphasizing the randomness generated by automatism. Voluminous piles of accumulated monoprint material, not unlike shed leaves, have been scrupulously and deviously reassembled, creating tree portraits with a quiver and a tremor, simultaneously familiar and uncanny.

Cut flower bouquets have been produced using the same technique, but here some humor intrudes – a swipe at the futile human attempt to bring amputated nature indoors; to transplant the dizzying force of a life from its habitat into ours.

MaryLou Zelazny, 2018

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As in past memorable performances here at Carl Hammer Gallery, Mary Lou Zelazny’s skillful craft acts as a viewer’s transport to other worlds and planes of existence. The illusion of our conveyance succeeds due to her incorporation of found popular culture media images seamlessly combined with the gestural fluidity of a painted background resulting in dualistic, dreamlike scenarios. Her combining of paint with the slickness of the clipped photograph/image creates an end result both expressive and stimulating. Figuration dominates the viewer’s first visual encounter with these hybrid images, but it is the abstraction of figure and background alike which draws and cements the work into unified, intriguing, visual experiences.